Tuesday, August 27, 2013

I am happy to announce that I will make a comeback as the
Infrastructure Ranger at Microsoft here in Norway.

This is the position I had last year.

This time, it will be in a smaller portion so that it
will work together with my role as the CTO in Lumagate. No – I am not a Microsoft employee. I am still a Cloud MVP, and I am still employed by Lumagate.

The reason for this blog post is not to brag nor to have
a random career monolog, but rather inform those of you who are working with me
about the situation.

The role as an infrastructure ranger is to provide
proof-of-concepts, workshops, pre-sales activities and be the technical
evangelist for the local MS office.

You may have heard about the V-TSP role, a role you can
get if you work for a Gold Partner where Microsoft can use the V-TSP in
pre-sales activities. This is something similar but at the same time very
different.

When I appear as a ranger, I will wear the Microsoft hat.
In other words, I will be partner neutral.

I am really looking forward to continue my close work
with Microsoft, to tell and deliver on the Cloud OS story.

Now, I have a very clear agenda with this.

In my job (as a CTO and ranger), it’s key to know the
customer we are working with to better understand their short – and long-term
goals in order to support this with modern technology. There is no secret that
I am deeply involved with service providers around the globe. One of the reasons
why service providers is so interesting is because IT is their bread and
butter. If you want to deploy the latest features and bits, service providers are
mostly often the right audience to adopt this fastest.

With Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and
Windows Azure (these are some of the bits that composes the Cloud OS), we are
starting up some couple of lighthouse projects to increase the standards
around.

In the end, it’s basically just a simple question you
need to ask yourselves: what can we do better within our datacenter (no matter
if it’s private or public) in order to succeed next?

If you want to read an article/interview (in Norwegian)
about my thoughts on R2, please see the following link.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

I’ve been diving into Windows Azure Pack lately, to
explore some of the cloud characteristics this solution will bring to your
organization together with System Center 2012 R2 (SCVMM, Orchestrator and SPF).

Recently, Microsoft announced some cool stuff on their
codeplex (community) site.

During TechEd, you may have seen the presentation by Eric
Winner and Marc Umeno on the subject, and where they talked about gallery items
in Windows Azure Pack.

What is gallery
items?

Gallery items in Windows Azure Pack is a set of
predefined services that you can
offer to your tenants.

Interesting is the relation to service templates in VMM
with the design, but currently they are very different.

A service template in VMM can be authored with both
PowerShell and the console, and is still the most flexible and powerful
solution. However, service templates isn’t exposed to the tenant API/portal in
Windows Azure Pack.

Hence, we get gallery items.

The story has been clear by now. This R2 release is a
result of huge investments in Windows Azure and Microsoft are first building
for the cloud (Azure) and then for bits you are able to purchase and run on
your own. Gallery items is basically “service templates” that is built to serve
a service, like web server, application server and any other server
role/application.

If you have little or none experience with Windows Azure,
please continue to read where I will try to explain in a bit more detail.

Windows Azure when first released, was all about Platform
as a Service. This service model (referring to the definition of cloud
computing) is basically based to provide developers with a scalable framework,
where they can write their code, upload the code and packages to Azure, where
Microsoft’s high-tech datacenters is able to execute the application in an
architecture where everything is loosely coupled.

Personally, this is perhaps the most interesting service
model as it ‘forces’ you to modernize you applications to fit into this model. If
you are looking for a place to run highly scalable internet application,
Windows Azure was a very good option back in 2008-2010.

We now got some new services in Windows Azure, and we can
leverage the more traditional Infrastructure as a Service – service model. This
gives us virtual compute, virtual networks, virtual storage and virtual
machines that we can manage as they were running on-premise.

As Infrastructure as a Service was introduced back in
2011, we saw some changes to the Platform as a Service mode, or to be more precisely,
we got something called ‘Cloud Services’.

Cloud Services was either a worker role, web role or a
virtual machine role.

Together with traditional virtual machines, we now had
options when creating applications and services for the public cloud.

Back to Windows Azure Pack.

In Windows Azure Pack, we can create traditional virtual
machines (infrastructure as a service) together with virtual networks. All of
this are running on Windows Server 2012 R2 (Hyper-V) and System Center 2012 R2
(SCVMM, Orchestrator with SPF).

New in this release, is support for both Service Bus and Virtual Machine Roles. Both of these
are related to platform as a service, and we are now focusing on Virtual
Machine Roles.

The gallery items are the building blocks for your
virtual machine roles.

Let’s explore this and see how we can get things running
in our cloud (either private cloud or service provider cloud).

Download gallery
items from Codeplex

A few sample gallery items are now available in the Web
Platform Installer now:

Please note that
only the three Windows Server 2012 * resources are related to gallery items.
Both Service Template Example Kit and Sharepoint 2013 Service Template are only
suited for service templates in SCVMM.

Once downloaded, we can navigate to the folder we placed
it into and see the items. Included with every resource, we have a readme file.

Note: there are some important
steps missing in the readme file to get this working, so pay attention to the
instructions later when importing and customizing the resources in the SCVMM
library.

How to import and
use Windows Server 2012 R2 Web Server Gallery Resource

To verify the import, run the get-CloudResourceExtension Powershell
command and locate the newly imported extension.

Get-CloudResourceExtension

2)Prepare the
virtual hard disk

Since you have
landed on this blog, I already assume you are familiar with sysprep and how to
take action on this, either manually or by using SCVMM.

You must
provide a virtual hard disk from which the virtual machine role will be
created. If you already have a vhdx file in your library, go ahead and use
this.

Note: to
actual get this working, you must have two disks in your library. One disk
containing the operating system, and one disk for the data partition. You only
have to prepare the partition used for the operating system in this guide. The disk
for data partition will be explained in a bit.

Since the
resource extension will only work with Windows Server 2012 /R2, use one of the
following operating system values on your Windows Server 2012/R2 hard disk:

The Operating System
value can be set using Powershell or the virtual machine manage administrator
console.

3)Familyname
and Release

These properties
must be set in order for the Windows Azure Pack portal to display the virtual
hard disk as an available disk for this gallery resource. The Familyname and Release
properties are shown in the portal drop-down list, so set them to values that
will make sense to your user.

Familyname property values should indicate the contents
of the virtual hard disk, including the Windows Server release and
edition. For this gallery resource, you
should consider the following Familyname values.

Windows Server 2012 Datacenter

Windows Server 2012 Standard

Windows Server 2012 Essentials

Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter Preview

Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard Preview

Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials Preview

Release property values must conform to the Windows Azure
versioning scheme of n.n.n.n

Familyname and
Release values can be set using Powershell or the virtual machine manage
administrator console.

Note:
repeat these steps on your virtual hard disk for the data partition. The important
thing to note here is that you must not define any operating system on
this disk, as the portal then will consider it to contain the operating system
and hence not list it in the data partition field in the portal.

4)Tags

The Windows Server 2012 gallery resource depends on a
virtual hard disk with the following tags

WindowsServer2012

.NET3.5

NOTE: this .NET3.5 tag indicates that you have
pre-installed .NET3.5 in your sysprepped VHD.

Once the resource extension and virtual hard disk are all
correctly set in SCVMM, you can import the resource definition package using
the Service Administrator Portal in the Windows Azure Pack.

Open the Service Admin Portal.

Navigate to the VM Clouds workspace.

Click the Gallery tab.

Click Import.

Select and import the WebServer(IIS).resdefpkg
file in the unzipped location.
The default unzip location is “c:\GalleryResources\WS2012WebServer-VMRole-Pkg\”

Note that the gallery item now is listed on
the Gallery tab.

Now that the packages for the Virtual Machine Role have been installed, you
can publish the gallery item to make it available to tenants.

To make the Virtual Machine Role available to the tenant, you need to add
it to a plan. In this procedure, you publish the Virtual Machine Role that you
installed.

On the Gallery tab, select the version of the
gallery item that you just imported.

Click the arrow next to the gallery item name.

Explore the details of the gallery item.

Navigate back and click Make Public.

Select the Plans workspace in the Service Admin
Portal.

Select the plan to which you want to add this gallery
item.

Select the Virtual Machine Clouds service.

Scroll to the Gallery section.

Click Add Gallery Items.

Select the gallery items that you imported, and then
click Save.

Brilliant, we
are almost done.

The last thing
to do, is to create a new tenant, or logon with an already existing tenant to
this portal.

The tenant
must then subscribe to a plan that is offering these gallery items.

Here’s some
screen shots on how to deploy a gallery item into a cloud defined in SCVMM,
presented by Windows Azure Pack:

6)Deploying
Virtual Machine Roles in Windows Azure Pack

In the portal,
click new à Virtual
Machine Role à From
Gallery.

This will
bring up the available gallery items.

In the ‘Create
Virtual Machine Role from ...’ screen, please select the proper item. In my
case, I have both a web server and a stand-alone Windows Server 2012 R2
resource. I will select my Web Server and proceed.

Assign the
virtual machine role with a name (during this process, Windows Azure Pack will
check with SCVMM if the name is available or already taken).

Select the
right version and the right hosting plan. If the gallery item is not available
in a hosting plan, you are unable to proceed.

The other disk
(containing no operating system, remember?) is listed here

IP Address allocation method

Dynamic or
static is the option here

IP Address type

IPv4 or IPv6

Logical Network

The networks
you have made available both in the cloud in SCVMM and in the plan is available
here. I would strongly suggest you to leverage network virtualization in this
case, and provide the tenants to create their own virtual networks prior to
this, and deploy the virtual machine role to this network.

New user name

Specify the
username

New Password

Assign a
password to the user

Confirm

Confirm your
password

Virtual Machine Name Pattern

Default, you
will se ‘Computer###’ where the hashes refers to incremental numbers.

Workgroup

Name of the
workgroup this virtual machine role should be a part of

Time Zone

Choose the
proper time zone for your virtual machine role

Initial Instance Count

How many
virtual machines will you deploy at first? This is where you define it

Minimum Instance Count

What’s the
minimum instances of the virtual machine role

Maximum Instance Count

Decide how
many instances this virtual machine role can scale out to.

Click next to
proceed

In this
screen, you can assign website name and application pool together with your
preferred TCP port.

This is
because we are deploying a web server virtual machine role. Once you are done,
click finish to start the deployment

Note: if
your cloud in SCVMM has any
capability profiles associated, the deployment will fail.

You must
uncheck any capability profiles since gallery items doesn’t have this property.

In the portal,
we can now see that the virtual machine role is being provisioned.

Since I am the
SCVMM admin as well, I can check in the Jobs view in the console, that some
cool stuff are actually taking place in my environment.

Once the
deployment has succeeded, you can manage it further in the tenant portal.

This screen
shots illustrates that I am able to scale my instances for this virtual machine
role.

Hopefully this
was useful to get you started with gallery items in Windows Azure Pack.

Monday, August 12, 2013

This autumn will be loaded with speaking engagement, and
together with Niklas Åkerlund in Sweden, I will have two days early in October
where we will talk, demonstrate and show the beautiful journey from VMware to
Hyper-V.

The reason why we are arranging such an event should be
clear by now.

More and more often, we are meeting customers and
partners who are seeking for advice when it comes to internal strategies
regarding their datacenters. Cost is (obviously) a major factor in this
calculation, but management and tools are very important too.

As you may be aware of, we are all waiting for the R2
release where we are moving towards a consistent platform with our Cloud OS.

As part of that, we will focus on things you might
normally miss during a normal “Hyper-V vs. VMware” discussion.

Generally speaking, we are constantly focusing on
features, licensing and costs when discussing the comparison of these vendors. However,
we are taking this to the next level and will focus on the real ‘battle’, the
battle the IT pro's are facing each and every day when working with their
management tools.

What are the real capabilities of both vCenter and SCVMM?

Are you planning for a solution that is working today
with specific thirds party vendors, or are you brave enough to look at this at
a higher level?

We will definitively show you that virtualization is a
lot more than just virtualization(!).

Remember that to fulfill your datacenter dream, we must
include both storage, network, HA, DR and much much more.

Here’s the agenda, and if you are nearby one of these
days, I would be glad to see you.

Agenda:

09.00 –
10.00
–What have happened with virtualization lately, and why we are here— (Level
200)
Let’s forget about features in the hypervisors for a second, and climb out of
the box to get a better perspective on things. In this session we will look at
the entire datacenter and explore what have happened, and where we are going.
This session will focus at the business level and help you to choose a strategy
for your investments..

10.00 –
10.45
– Building your Hyper-V Private Cloud with System Center—(Level 400)
System Center 2012 R2 – Virtual Machine Manager may be the best example to show
datacenter abstraction layer in real life. This session will focus on Fabric
management in VMM 2012 R2, and show how you can integrate, abstract and manage
the datacenter pieces. All within a single console.
Network management, storage management, multi-hypervisor management,
automation, anf life-cycle management.

11.00 –
11.40
– Performing the switch from VMware to Hyper-V— (Level 400)
There are several tools available to help you with the conversion from VMware
to Hyper-V.
This session will show you how you easily can do this manually, automated and
simplified with existing tools.

11.40 –
12.00 Lunsj

12.00 –
12.45–Lessons learned from early switchers—(Level 300)
Many customers and partners have already made the switch, consulted by
Lumagate. In this session, we will share the common pitfalls, best practice and
what benefits we are seeing at both a short and long term.

12.45–
14:00
Discussion and Q&A
Make the most of it and ask the experts about anything about cloud computing
and virtualization and get assistance and guidance before you continue on your
journey.

Kristian
Nese is an experienced speaker, author and evangelist in the cloud computing
space, and have implemented private clouds and service provider clouds for some
of the largest organizations globally. He’s been working with Hyper-V and
System Center since the early beta days back in 2007, and this has led to
several books on the subject.
Kristian is an experienced speaker, delivering both keynotes and highly
technical sessions (level 400) on subjects like Windows Azure, System Center,
Windows Server and Hyper-V, and often used by Microsoft nationally and
globally, both as a speaker and writer
To stay sharp, he spend a lot of time in the TechNet forums as well, trying to
help the community so they can get the most out of the technology, and deliver
training world wide.

Kristian
is known for his subject matter expertise within cloud and his heavy coffee
consumption.

Niklas
Åkerlund
Niklas Akerlund is the Product Manager for Private Cloud at Lumagate. Niklas
has been working with Microsoft infrastructure solutions since 1998. He has
quite some experience in virtualization projects with consolidation planning
and migrations from physical to virtual. Niklas have done both project
management and technical design in Hyper-V upgrades and new installations.
Niklas started working with Hyper-V at a former Employee in the TAP program for
Windows Server 2008 and has a big interest in automation and optimization of
virtual machines and hosts. He was also responsible for the TAP program
engagement for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 at RTS. Niklas has
been speaking on Technet Sweden events and continuously as a MCT at a local
learning center. He is also an VMware vExpert 2013 as well as VCP 5. Niklas
writes blog articles at vniklas.djungeln.se with automation and virtualization
as a focus area. You can find him on twitter where his handle is @vNiklas

Monday, August 5, 2013

This is my first blog post after two weeks of vacation. I
have never been away from work that long before, and I feel like a rookie J

Therefore, I will start to blog with this short blog post
about Microsoft Vice President for Windows Server and System Center, Brad
Anderson.

One of the thing that keeps me awake at night is when I
think about the big picture.

With the upcoming releases of both Windows Server 2012 R2
and System Center 2012 R2, we have a bunch of new features. Many of my friends
and colleagues in the industry are very feature oriented. And before I
continue, there’s nothing wrong with that. However, this may limit their
options when it comes to career opportunities. Some people are very satisfied
with the situation of being the hot shot consultant, knowing every how-to of
their primary products. And some others are leaning more over to the
abstraction of those features, curious to know all the ‘what’ and ‘why’. I like
to consider myself as one of those, although I have a deep technology hunger as
well. To summarize, a good mix is necessary to keep me smiling and satisfied.

Brad Anderson is one of those individuals that inspires
me when it comes to the ‘why’ and ‘what’ things.

Not only is he running the show of both Windows Server
and System Center, but he has really deep insight into the industry and is able
to explain complex things that everyone could understand.

This is why I would like to give you a heads up on his
new blog “In the Cloud”.